Hey everyone, meet Karen Linton, whom I know best as @savinggrc on Twitter. Karen signed up to do a block for Uberfest, and then we both discovered that her lack of a blog was a teensy problem….Well, at Blue Nickel Studios, we don’t mess around….and we don’t ditch people either…so Karen is my guest and blogger for the day here at BNS. (truth be told, Karen used to have a blog, but since she writes for a living, keeping a blog up wasn’t that much fun for her anymore, but quilting sure is!)

Here is Karen with Sam, her husband of nearly 13 years.

Karen writes:

“I’m a high school math teacher by trade, but currently work very part-time as a grant writer for The Voice of the Martyrs.(www.persecution.com). I am the mom of three boys, Dominic, 21, Samuel, 19, and Joshua, 18. We are ecstatic to be empty-nesters. Since we homeschooled from kindergarten through graduation and my husband worked from home for 9 of those years, we were all home together, all the time. It’s nice to have the house to ourselves. On the other hand, now I only have the dogs to blame for any messes in the house and that doesn’t work well with anything not on the floor. Sadly.

I learned to sew in junior high home-ec class, but didn’t start quilting until about 4 years ago. So, I’m a relative newbie. My great-grandmother and my grandmother (mom’s side) were both quilters. I have a dozen or so quilts they made and one my great-great grandmother made. My mom can’t/won’t sew on a button, so it somehow skipped a generation.

Anyhow, all that to say I love quilting, well, mostly piecing. That quilting part is not my fav and I still don’t know how to do binding “properly,” but I had a great time doing the block for Uberfest and piecing all my ideas and then discarding them. Haha. Thanks for following along and have fun piecing South for Winter!

I was so very excited to be asked to create a block for the Quilt-Uber-fest, especially since I had never really designed a block before. I’ve been sewing for a few years and I’ve followed many tutorials online, some good and some not so much, but designing my own block? Fun! I hope my tutorial is clear and easy to follow. Download the full PDF here.

Scott sent us four fabrics with 2 focals from the uber-beautiful line Sleeping Beauty. I have the purple butterfly and the green/purple leaf as well as Kaffe Fasset’s Woven Haze Stripe in Terra Cotta and his Shot Cotton in Terra Cotta.

He said we could add one fabric of our choice. I did choose! I have a stack of Kaufman Kona Solids and tried to match nearly every one of them with the fabrics from Scott. I ended up using this dark green, whose real name I do not know. (sorry) So, here’s what I’m working with:

and here’s my finished block “South for Winter”:

Thanks for following along! Join us tomorrow as Konda Luckau of Moose on the Porch Quilts shares her uber-cool block! Thanks to Scott for the great QAL, I love these things. If I did every one I saw online, I’d forever be in one. Thanks, too, for allowing my day on your blog.”

-Karen (@savinggrc on Twitter and Flickr)

Thanks for the great block Karen! I love it. Don’t forget to put your pictures of your blocks on our Flickr Page! We can’t wait to see what you come up with.